May 14: Presentations

Projects are due before class begins today. You’ll find submission instructions on the Requirements page.

The remaining half of students will present their work today.

I’m hoping that you’ve used our Designing Methodologies class to, well, design a methodology for a project you’d actually like to execute — as a thesis project or independent study, as a series of cumulative class projects, as a summer enrichment project, as a post-graduation pursuit, as a long-term endeavor, etc. Thus, we’ll aim use our final presentations not to signal the finality of your work, but to celebrate 15 weeks’ worth of development, and to launch you into your next phase of work: polishing a thesis proposal for committee review, submitting a grant proposal to a potential funder, pitching a project to a current or potential employer or group of collaborators, etc. We’ll therefore structure our presentations on May 7 and 14 as “mock reviews,” so we, your colleagues, know how to evaluate your work — and how to provide feedback that will help you move forward.

Here are some guidelines for your presentations:

Each student will have a total of 15 minutes to present and solicit feedback. You should aim to talk for no longer than ten minutes, leaving at least five minutes for discussion.

You should begin your presentation by telling us your desired “end goal” for your project — will it become a thesis or a business plan, or do you have no further aspirations beyond this semester? — and telling us, your audience, what evaluative role you want us to play: should we imagine we’re potential NEH grant reviewers, venture capitalists, thesis committee members, etc?

You’re not obligated to use slides, but if you choose to do so, please add them to our collaborative slideshow. You can use as many slides as you like and structure them as you wish.

Make sure to focus on concrete details: what, specifically, are you proposing to do? And emphasize the elements that a review board would care about: your methods of execution, justification for your chosen methods and frameworks, discussion of your project’s relevance and value (so what? why do we need your work?), and justification for why you’re the right person to dothis work.